Washington Post replaces ombudsman with 'reader representative'

3/1/13 5:14 PM EST

The Washington Post is replacing its ombudsman with a “reader representative” who will be an employee of the paper without a regular weekly column, publisher Katharine Weymouth announced Friday.

“The world has changed, and we at The Post must change with it,” she wrote in a letter to readers. “We have been privileged to have had the service of many talented ombudsmen (and women) who have addressed readers’ concerns, answered their questions and held The Post to the highest standards of journalism. Those duties are as critical today as ever. Yet it is time that the way these duties are performed evolves.”

In place of an independent ombudsman, the Post will “appoint a reader representative” who will write from “time to time to address reader concerns,” Weymouth wrote.

“Unlike ombudsmen in the past, the reader representative will be a Post employee,” she noted. “The representative will not write a weekly column for the page but will write online and/or in the newspaper from time to time to address reader concerns, with responses from editors, reporters or business executives as appropriate.”

The ombudsman position, which had existed for nearly 43 years at the Post, was “created decades ago for a different era,” she wrote. Still, she said, “we remain faithful to the mission.”

The Post’s last ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, finished his term on Feb. 28.